Read Cleopatra and Antony Online
Authors: Diana Preston
Ptolemy pushed Arsinoe and Ganymedes aside and took command of the royal forces besieging the palace quarter. However, by early March 47 the bulk of Caesar’s long and eagerly awaited reinforcements from Syria and Asia Minor were finally approaching overland. At Ascalon they were joined by Jewish troops from Judaea led by Antipater, father of the future King Herod. Under the overall command of Mithridates of Pergamum, the relief force assaulted and swiftly took the Egyptian frontier stronghold of Pelusium before sweeping on toward Alexandria and a rendezvous with Caesar. To reach the city they had first to cross the branches of the Nile delta. Hoping to check their advance, Ptolemy loaded a large force onto his ships and sailed out of Alexandria through the city’s network of waterways to Lake Mareotis and into the Canopic branch of the Nile, along which Mithridates was advancing. Learning of this, Caesar left a small detachment to protect Cleopatra and sailed westward by sea out of Alexandria.
Landing along the coast, Caesar marched rapidly southeast and rendezvoused with the relief force before the Egyptians could come up. Determined to retain the initiative, he turned his attention to the well-defended camp, over the Canopic branch of the Nile, where young King Ptolemy and his advisers were debating their next step. Caesar’s legionaries plunged into the warm water or felled trees for makeshift bridges, which they swarmed across. After a stiff fight they eventually took the camp, only to find that the king had fled. However, the ship he had hurriedly boarded sank beneath the weight of panicking men trying to follow their king to safety. Ptolemy drowned. On learning of this, Ganymedes, Arsinoe and the Egyptian army surrendered.
The Alexandrian War was finally over and that night the victorious Caesar hastened back to Alexandria and Cleopatra with his cavalry. He entered through the part of the city formerly held by his enemies, where, as the author of
The Alexandrian War
recorded, “the entire population of townsfolk threw down their arms, abandoned their fortifications . . . and surrendered themselves to him,” leaving Caesar “master of Egypt and Alexandria.” To prove to the populace that Ptolemy had indeed perished, Caesar ordered the Nile to be dragged until his sodden body was found and then put his golden armor on display.
The dangerous and costly conflict he had just won gave Caesar ample cause to annex Egypt as a Roman province, but he did not. Instead, he confirmed his mistress as queen with, as her co-ruler, her remaining half brother, the twelve-year-old Ptolemy XIV. Cleopatra must also have been gratified that Caesar made her co-ruler with her brother over Cyprus, conferring the island on them as the rulers of Egypt. Cyprus’ previous and short-lived queen, the disgraced Arsinoe, was to be sent to Rome to pay the price for her duplicity by trudging as a captive in the procession celebrating Caesar’s triumph.
Caesar’s actions perhaps reveal something of his feelings for Cleopatra, who, as the author of
The Alexandrian War
states with what with hindsight seems dry economy, “had remained loyal.” He is primly silent on the intimate form the Egyptian queen’s “loyalty” had taken. Cleopatra was by now pregnant with a child conceived while the danger to herself and Caesar from the Alexandrian mob and the Egyptian army had been at its height. However, though seemingly still infatuated with the Egyptian queen and no doubt flattered by the signs of his virility, Caesar was not so lost to love and what the poet Lucan called “Cleopatra’s wicked beauty” that he allowed it to dictate his judgment. His decision was guided above all by the perennial “Egyptian problem” that had so often perplexed Rome—the fact that Egypt was too rich and important to become a province lest, in Suetonius’ words, “it might one day be held against his fellow-countrymen by some independent-minded governor-general.”
Many would later argue, for motives of their own, that Cleopatra’s child was not Caesar’s. After all, during his entire life this great lover of women had sired only one acknowledged child, his beloved daughter, Julia, born many years earlier. In twelve years of marriage, his then wife, Calpurnia, had not once conceived. However, while Caesar may have had a low sperm count, it is equally possible that Calpurnia was infertile. Furthermore, that his many wellborn Roman mistresses do not appear to have borne him children is also no proof of his infertility. Some would have passed his children off as their husband’s; others would have used contraceptive techniques. Though some of these were bizarre—from wearing a cat’s liver in a tube on the left foot to carrying part of a lioness’ womb in an ivory tube—more sensible and effective methods were available, including blocking the passage to the uterus with concoctions of oil, honey and wool. It was also possible to procure abortions, prompting Ovid’s indignant plaint, “Why do you dig out your child with sharp instruments?” Another reason suggested for the relatively low fertility among the Roman elite was the effect of the lead used in the city’s water pipes.
Also, if not Caesar, who was the father of the child with whom Cleopatra was swelling visibly? To strengthen her alliance with a protector who she suspected might be incapable of impregnating her, Cleopatra could have taken another, clandestine, lover. Yet the women of the inbred house of Ptolemy were obsessively proud of their lineage and it seems highly unlikely that Cleopatra would have found a man she considered suitable as a Caesar surrogate. It is also implausible that such a careful tactician as Cleopatra would have risked her budding relationship with Caesar by such a trick in the hothouse atmosphere of the palace, where little remained secret for long.
With matters successfully concluded, including access to Egypt’s treasure houses to replenish his coffers, Caesar should have left Egypt at once. Though he had appointed Antony his deputy or
magister equitum
(master of the horse) in Italy while he pursued Pompey to Egypt, and knew he could depend on his loyalty, much required his urgent personal attention. Rome’s civil war was not yet over. Pompey’s supporters were rallying in Africa while, in Asia Minor, King Pharnaces of Pontus was threatening to become as great a menace to Rome as his father, Mithridates, who had taken such pleasure in slaughtering Italian women and children. Instead, using the somewhat lame excuse that the seasonal winds that blew into the harbor mouth continued to make the departure of his fleet difficult, the usually highly disciplined Caesar entirely atypically chose to linger by Cleopatra’s side. According to Suetonius, he would feast with his lover until the sun rose over the city to challenge the light of the Pharos.
In the early spring of 47, it seems that Caesar embarked with Cleopatra on a cruise up the Nile. Egyptian royal barges were the stuff of fantasy—sumptuous floating palaces of fragrant cedar and cypress about three hundred feet long, forty-five feet wide and sixty feet high, hung with costly fabrics and sparkling with gems, all supported on twin, catamaran-like hulls. Lying on silken couches and cooled by peacock-feather fans, the lovers could dally as they floated past the rich bright green farmlands along the Nile, Caesar adorned with the wreaths of flowers that were a Ptolemaic fashion.
However, it was more than a pleasure trip. For Cleopatra, there was a strategic purpose in showing herself to the wider Egyptian population beyond Alexandria. Cleopatra was unpopular in her idiosyncratic, cosmopolitan capital, but her relationship with the people of the countryside and especially those of Upper Egypt was warmer. They remembered her homage to the Buchis bull at Her-monthis early in her reign and it was to them that she had first turned for help when forced to flee Alexandria. Now they could see their Isis restored to divine majesty with her powerful Roman ally by her side.
From Caesar’s point of view, there was also some political point to this pleasurable river trip—to demonstrate the power of Rome. Appian claims that four hundred ships accompanied the barge. Suetonius states that the plan was to sail to the southernmost part of Egypt, “nearly to Ethiopia,” but that, echoing the reluctance of Alexander’s troops to advance into India, Caesar’s men grew restive and the trip was curtailed. Perhaps the hardened legionaries, hungry for home, wondered what was the point of drifting along the Nile, apart from allowing their leader a scenic sexual interlude—certainly when Caesar finally returned to Rome, his men would sing ribald verses about his enthusiastic couplings with the Egyptian queen. In Rome, Cicero too was wondering where Caesar was, writing, “Caesar seems to be so stuck in Alexandria that he is ashamed even to write about the situation there.”
Soon after their return to Alexandria, in late June or early July 47, Caesar at last left Egypt, marching with his troops across the hot deserts into Syria. He was not leaving his heavily pregnant mistress unprotected. To defend her—and to guard Rome’s interests—he left behind three legions under the command of a courageous but humbly born officer named Rufio, the son of an emancipated slave. In so doing, Caesar was disregarding the long-established practice whereby only officers who were also senators could command Rome’s legions. Yet, mirroring his fears over appointing a governor, Caesar was wary of ceding too much power in Egypt to a potential rival. The son of a former slave was a safer bet.
For the first time since the death of her father, Cleopatra had a protector. Although he would be many miles away from her, he had the power to reach out to her should danger threaten. It is perhaps indicative of her gratitude, her relief and even her love for him that she began building a vast and ostentatiously splendid monument to Caesar—the Caesareum—on the harbor. It must have been a pleasing distraction as she awaited the arrival of the child that would be tangible proof of her alliance with the most powerful man in Rome. An inscription in Memphis suggests that Cleopatra gave birth in early September 47, just a few weeks after Caesar’s departure. The child was a son and, with their usual pointed wit, the Alexandrians called him Caesarion, “little Caesar.” Cleopatra herself called him Ptolemy Caesar and, even more portentously, an inscription at Hermonthis on the Upper Nile welcomed the baby as “the child of Amon Ra created through the human agency of Julius Caesar.” In celebration, Cleopatra ordered the day of his birth to be celebrated as a feast of Isis and also issued new coins in Cyprus. They made no mention of her new husband, Ptolemy XIV. Instead they depicted Cleopatra as Isis suckling her newborn son, the divine child Horus. The reverse side depicted a double cornucopia—an ancient symbol of the Ptolemies signifying a new golden age.
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Cleopatra also ordered bas-reliefs to be carved on the outer walls of the Temple of Hathor, the Egyptian goddess of love, music, joy and fertility, founded by Auletes at Dendera. On one side of the hundred-foot rear wall she and Caesarion were depicted on a monumental scale making offerings of burning incense to Hathor and her infant son. The exact date of these carvings is unknown, but the imagery was carefully chosen—Hathor’s consort, the triumphant Horus, did not dwell within the same temple. Instead, he lived far away to the south in the temple of Edfu. Once a year, in the Festival of the Beautiful Embrace, an image of Hathor was carried by barge to Edfu. The situation was a neat parallel to Cleopatra’s relationship with the absent Caesar. On the other side of the wall, Cleopatra and Caesarion were again depicted, this time making offerings to Isis and her brother-husband Osiris. Cleopatra, shown in the Egyptian style as a slender-bodied, near-naked figure with a protuberant navel, was identifying herself with Hathor and Isis and her son with Horus. The message to her Egyptian subjects was clear: Cleopatra, queen and goddess, had given Egypt—and the Ptolemies—a divine heir.
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C
AESAR’S EMOTIONS ON PARTING from Cleopatra are not recorded but he was immediately preoccupied. According to the author of
The
Alexandrian War
, as soon as Caesar reached Syria he learned that “there was much that was bad and unprofitable in the administration at Rome” and that rivalries among the tribunes were producing “dangerous rifts.” Caesar, though, did not rush home. Instead, he turned his attention to King Pharnaces of Pontus. Attempting to regain his father’s territories, Pharnaces had recently defeated a Roman army sent to stop him and was now inciting other local rulers to rebel. So lightning-quick and easy was Caesar’s victory over Pharnaces in Pontus that he could write boastfully to a friend, “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered). He added that it was little wonder that Pompey had built a reputation as a great general if all the eastern enemies he had fought had been of this caliber.
On September 24, 47, Caesar finally landed back in Italy and hurried to Rome to assess the “dangerous rifts” for himself. The problems were formidable—restive, time-served legions eager for disbandment, breakdowns in law and order and economic stagnation. Antony had not performed as well this time as he had during Caesar’s absence fighting against Pompey’s supporters in Spain.
The thirty-six-year-old Antony had, of course, proved his talents as a military commander early in Egypt and later in Gaul. His men loved him for his courage, judgment and stamina and also for his generosity. Like Caesar, he had an effortless charm and understood how to inspire loyalty and devotion. Plutarch noted how he had the common touch—the ability to make himself one of the lads: “his swaggering air, his ribald talk, his fondness for carousing in public, sitting down by his men as they ate, or taking his own food standing at the common-mess table made his own troops delight in his company and almost worship him.” An imposing physical appearance enhanced his endearingly bluff manner. A handsome bull of a man with wild curls, broad shoulders and muscular thighs, he exuded strength and energy. Cicero would sneeringly deride him as resembling a prizefighter.
Antony could also be a clear-thinking, imaginative, decisive administrator—otherwise Caesar would not have twice left him in charge of Italy in critical times. However, growing quickly bored with the routines of political and administrative life, which held little appeal for him as a natural man of action rather than reflection, Antony had given way with gusto to his sensual, self-indulgent side. Lost in a sybaritic whirl of parties, drinking and lovemaking, his favorite companions had become actors, musicians and courtesans. With ill-placed brio, he had taken to riding about in a chariot drawn by lions in imitation of Bacchus or to taking his favorite actress with him when he visited other cities on official business, reputedly providing her with a retinue larger than he accorded his mother, Julia. Racked by hangovers and bleary-eyed after all-night drinking bouts, he struggled to get out of bed in the morning. On one occasion, after a particularly heavy night, he astonished members of the popular assembly who had summoned him to an early meeting by arriving still worse for wear and throwing up in front of them into a cloak thoughtfully held out for him by one of his friends. When riots broke out in support of attempts by the tribune Dolabella to introduce a decree canceling all debts, a lethargic Antony had at first done nothing, then reacted with unnecessary violence. One reason for his sudden brutality was said to be a growing suspicion that Dola-bella was cuckolding him with his wife, Antonia.
Convinced that Antony’s had not been a safe pair of hands, Caesar, for the moment at least, dropped him, leaving him without any official role. He had himself elected as consul for the following year, 46, and chose a relative nonentity, Lepidus, whom he thought could be trusted to show no initiative, to be his co-consul and to replace Antony as master of the horse. To sweeten his political supporters, Caesar increased the number of priesthoods and praetor-ships and appointed his cronies to them. To seduce the populace, he ordered landlords to freeze their rents for a year. He also placed a ban on some of the 94 luxury foods that made up such a key part of the conspicuous consumption envied and despised in equal measure by those unable to afford it. Cicero later complained that having to eat turnips rather than oysters and eels had given him violent diarrhea.
At the same time, Caesar needed money. The civil war was not over and he needed to be able pay his armies to fight for him. After Pharsalus, Cato, one of the most important surviving republicans, had fled to the Roman province of Africa (modern-day Tunisia) and with the help of King Juba of Numidia (northern Algeria) had gathered a large force to continue the fight against Caesar. To raise the necessary funds, Caesar ordered towns across Italy to send gold and took out loans. He also auctioned off the property of those opponents he had not pardoned. Antony was among those who made foolishly high bids, mistakenly convinced that, as Caesar’s friends, they would never be expected to pay up. Antony moved into Pompey’s luxurious town house, which he had acquired at one of the auctions—according to Plutarch, ransacking and rebuilding it “as if it were not grand enough as it was”—only to be shocked when officials arrived to demand the money he owed for it.
But even with money, Caesar found it hard to raise the army he needed. Many of his experienced legionaries were tired. They wanted to disband and settle into the quiet life on a nice piece of land they believed was their due. Some, including Caesar’s beloved Tenth Legion, marched to the Campus Martius, where they asked to be released. Caesar handled them with consummate skill. Addressing them as
quirites
, fellow citizens rather than fellow soldiers, implying they were already free of the army, he agreed to release them. They would receive their promised rewards, he assured them, but only when he returned in triumph from Africa with the new army he would recruit to replace them. This had the anticipated effect—the legionaries, shocked not to be considered indispensable, clamored to accompany the leader whom most of them revered and to share in the glory of his expedition.
That glory was hard won. High winds scattered Caesar’s ships as they sailed for Africa from Sicily and, once they had arrived, food soon became scarce. The horses wrinkled their lips at their sparse diet of rinsed seaweed and grass. At the same time, Caesar’s adversaries played hit-and-run, avoiding offering battle. However, in April 46 Caesar engaged the Pompeian forces at Thapsus. Some accounts suggest that while he was drawing up his forces Caesar suffered what Plutarch called “one of his usual fits,” presumably an epileptic attack. This may explain why, for the only time in Caesar’s career, his soldiers attacked before he gave the order. Whatever the case, victory was swift and complete.
News of it reached Cato, left in command of a fortress at Utica on the coast twenty miles from the tumbled ruins of Carthage. Ever since Caesar had forced Pompey out of Italy, the forty-eight-year-old Cato had refused to cut his hair or beard. After Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus, as a mark of mourning, he had eaten sitting, rather than reclining as a Roman should, and had lain down only to sleep.
At dinner, after hearing the news of Thapsus, Cato began to debate philosophy with his friends. The Romans had compensated themselves for the absence of an integrated theology by the contemplation of the sophisticated philosophies of the Greeks, from whose relatively abstract theorizing they derived practical guidance. Two philosophies were prevalent. One was Epicureanism, whose eponymous founder, Epicurus, propounded salvation by common sense and happiness through peace of mind. He dismissed divine providence and the immortality of the soul as illusory. Man should enjoy the world as it is, rejoicing in nature. The universe was limitless. Knowledge was generated through man’s inquiring mind and he should strive to understand and enjoy nature’s bounty. Remarkably for a man who lived more than two millennia ago, Epicurus emphasized that man should cease depleting the planet’s resources through his insatiable greed.
The other was the somewhat somber Stoic philosophy named after the stoa or painted covered passage leading from the Athens marketplace where its originator, Zeno, propounded it. His thesis was that man is a rational being who should lead a virtuous life practicing civic duty, self-discipline and tolerance and respect for others. He should accept and endure whatever fate held in store for him with dignity. In so doing, while conquering himself and his fears, he could take pride in rising spiritually above the vicissitudes of life. Cato was, unsurprisingly, a Stoic, who in the dinnertime conversation that night was adamant that only such a good man could be free. Stoic philosophy predisposed its followers to seek “a good death,” even if it was by their own hand, and this was the course Cato determined to follow.
After retiring for the night, Cato stabbed himself in the abdomen. When his son, alerted by the sound of his father’s body crashing to the floor and knocking over an abacus, discovered what he had done, he summoned physicians to push his father’s protruding intestines back into his body cavity and sew up the wound, but Cato ripped off the dressings. According to Appian, he “opened the suture of the wound, enlarged it with his nails like a wild beast, plunged his fingers into his stomach and tore out his entrails.” His final advice to his grieving son was, “In present conditions it is impossible to engage in politics in a manner befitting a Cato, and to engage in them in any other way would be disgraceful.” By the time Caesar reached Utica, Cato was already in his grave, a potent martyr for the austere old republican values, as he had intended. Just before his death he had said, “I am not willing to be indebted to the tyrant for his illegal actions. He is acting contrary to the laws when he pardons men as if he were their master when he has no sovereignty over them.”
In late July 46, Caesar, decked with the laurels of victory, marched back into Rome. The Senate was apprehensive. The followers of the traditions of the elders could only hope that, like Sulla, he would swiftly renounce his powers after rewarding his friends, thus leaving their unwritten constitution basically unchanged. It cannot have encouraged them that at around this time Caesar sent messengers to Egypt summoning Cleopatra to join him. The publicly proclaimed purpose of Cleopatra’s visit was to reaffirm the bonds between Egypt and Rome but the prospect of the Egyptian queen’s arrival must have stoked senatorial concern that Caesar might be seeking autocratic power in Rome similar to that which Cleopatra wielded in Egypt.
Caesar’s true motives for sending for Cleopatra are as intriguing as they are opaque. He was far too wise not to have realized that there was no political imperative for Cleopatra’s presence and indeed some downside to it. Perhaps his action had something to do with his own self-image. With her would come Caesarion—reassuring confirmation that, though middle-aged, Caesar was virile and vigorous. He would also have been curious to see his only son, by then nearly a year old.
In addition, the thought of his royal mistress witnessing his pomp and power must have been highly appealing. Even before he had marched back into Rome, the Senate had awarded him unique privileges in order to appease his ambition. He was to be dictator for the next ten years—an unprecedented period—and have the right to nominate magistrates. He was also to be prefect of morals, a new position that caused some sniggering but would allow him to censor and control his opponents. The
supplicatio
, the traditional festival of prayers and thanksgiving to honor a victor, was to last forty days compared with the fifteen that had celebrated Caesar’s successes in Gaul in 57, and his triumphal chariot was to be placed before the statue of Jupiter on the Capitol, together with a bronze statue of Caesar, bestriding a globe to symbolize his mastery of the world. The inscription would hail him as a demigod.
The Senate also awarded Caesar his Triumphs. Between September 20 and October 1 Caesar held four great parades marking his victories over Gaul, Egypt, Pontus and Africa. The processions, each lasting a day, began in the Campus Martius and ended before the Temple of Jupiter. Here Caesar ascended the hundred steps, passed through the great bronze gates and sacrificed white bulls before laying his laurels in the lap of the god. The marveling crowds were shielded from the autumn sun by silken awnings extending all the way up to the Capitol. Among the impressive trophies and gorgeous treasures carried by the marching columns were signs boasting of the number of battles fought and enemies killed. The tally was fifty battles and between one million and two million slain, excluding his fellow Roman citizens. Caesar, wearing a rippling purple toga, rode in his triumphal chariot pulled by three white horses. His face was painted with red lead in tribute to Jupiter, who had made Rome great and whose representative Caesar was. His balding head was wreathed in laurels and in his hand he grasped an eagle-headed scepter. Lest in these moments of glory he forget his mortality, as was traditional, a slave holding a golden wreath above his head whispered repeatedly in his red-tinted ear, “Remember you are human.”
In the procession celebrating Caesar’s victory in the Alexandrian War, mock flames rose from a model of the phallic Pharos lighthouse borne through the streets as Caesar’s men belted out raucous songs celebrating their leader’s sexual feats in Egypt. The crowds roared their approval at pictures portraying the bloody deaths of Pothinus and Achillas, but their greatest interest was in the pathetic figure of Cleopatra’s half sister, Arsinoe, stumbling along in chains with the other prisoners at the head of the procession. Prisoners were usually executed immediately after a Triumph. Vercingetorix, who had been kept caged for six years after his capture, had been executed immediately after the Gallic Triumph. However, the sight of the young princess roused the pity of the Roman crowd. Caesar read the people’s mood and spared her the strangling that was the traditional fate of conquered rulers. He permitted Arsinoe to leave Rome and, like her father, Auletes, before her, to seek sanctuary in the vast white marble temple of Artemis at Ephesus, whose fine ivory doors had been installed by her father.